


Thoughts From A Crappy Plastic World Notebook

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Borderland Series - Terri Windling
Genre: Character sketches, F/F, Poetry, Recipes, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2018-08-08 02:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7739326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another runaway's banal thoughts about the City on the Border, featuring character sketches of acquaintances, terrible poetry, and far too much introspection to be healthy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pages 1-11

Writing is hard. It doesn’t have the instant gratification factor of visual art—any visual art—or the obvious necessity for technical mastery of music. Your audience needs patience, interest, and the capacity to give you the benefit of the doubt—three things in short supply on the Border.

~*~

Kore (“every other goth nerd goes by Persephone”) is about 5’6 and dresses like an 80s glam rocker, all huge magenta hair and jodhpurs. She wants to join the Horn Dance someday but for right now mostly lives upstairs doing maintenance and painting the shutters a different color every other week. Right now they’re bright red. I told her they looked like labia and she thoughtfully painted a cock on my window the next time I went out.

~*~

Foolproof Mead Fermenting:

1.5 quarts of honey

1 pint water plus .25 cup

1 t inactive yeast

Seasonings (cloves if you're not feeling confident, can calm the yeast down apparently)

 

Let yeast sit in a dark place for a full lunar cycle (ideally start with the new moon.) Starting around sunrise, bring a pint of water to a boil, dissolve honey in it. Put yeast in .25 cup warm water until soft, add to honey water and let cool. Put into sealed container with seasonings, (Andy has one?) let ferment a month or until the next new moon, the one after that if you want something mellower.

~*~

I’m not sure if Tudor Rose is even half elven but she plays up the slinky, no-color fabrics over jeans and T-shirts so much that most people either take it as read or hear her try to speak Realm-ese, look pained, and disregard her for the rest of time. Also the hair’s an obvious shout-out to Linnea Bloodgarnet considering its weird red-purple-brown hue not found in nature either side of the Border. Still, she’s the only one who can get the electricity to run at work and she knows how to predict which gangs to watch out for on Ho Street via tea leaves so I’ll usually not along with her pseudo-cryptic hints about being the daughter of a stolen child from the Realm.

~*~

Can you really say you’re bad at handicrafts if you write? I guess it’s one thing if you use a word processor but I feel like there’s enough of a charm and a manual satisfaction to scribbling with a ballpoint pen in a crappy plastic World notebook for it to qualify. If I put my mind to it I could probably calligraph like a boss at this point. Still, having only that to show when you live with a sculptor, a baker and a builder has its downsides. Curse this saturation of actually talented artsy runaways I occupy space with.

~*~

Best I can tell Michelle’s real name is Michelle and she really thought a food cart in Bordertown would be a good idea. I’m not sure what annoys me more—that she was right, or that she thought of it first. She’s third-generation Japanese, never been to Japan in her life (I don’t doubt that either) and sells corn taco shells with whatever she can find in them most days at the Letterville market. I wish she’d do more of the strawberry-fish ones with mole, but apparently chocolate’s gone up in price even since I got here and she refuses to make do with Hershey’s.

~*~

where I come and go

thorns parted long ago

the Hall stands occupied

roses blown in our own foolish pride

~*~

It seems like there are two stereotypes for baker chicks: the fat, motherly, good-smelling one and the hatchet-faced kitchen tyrant whose food could make the most jaded palates either side of the Border weep. I’m not saying that Jay is completely the latter because I don’t want her to stab me, but all I’ll say is a) she’s skinnier than the borderline-anorexic 14-year-old I used to be, b) her apricot cream strudel will make you want to be a better person, and c) never wander into the kitchen for a late-night cup of coffee when she’s on a catering deadline. Unless, like me, you want to be press-ganged into kitchen service for an hour, screamed at the whole time, and then released with a fun variety of cuts, burns and bruises wondering what just happened. (To be fair, she at least gave me a cut of her commission, so I’m not complaining too much.)

~*~

If I hear, read or write one more remix of Tam Lin I’m going to drown myself.

~*~

Since she moved in a few months after me, Andy’s mostly divided her time between the semi-insulated attic where she sleeps and entertains her weird human S.O. (they’re incredibly androgynous and I’ve never gotten a name or a set of pronouns) and the shed where she does found-object sculpture. Seeing her at work is just about the most B-town thing you’ve ever seen—brown-haired halfie with the really classical True features lugging bags on bags of junk into someone’s cute little pre-return English cottagey-looking garden shed, then throwing on a kerchief and welding goggles and going to town on rusted screws, chunks of petrified Nevernever mushrooms and what look like patent medicine bottles. Her last show paid for three more months of gallery space, plus Nider’s monthly gouging and Indian food for all of us. (Meanwhile, I still write copy for sub-Rag birdcage liners and wait tables four nights a week, down from five since I moved onto fixing the press at the Wordhole “office.”)  We all know she has a knack you might call magical for getting that stupid blowtorch to burn and just the right angles of light and shadow to turn her stuff into something special, visually speaking, but the number of hours she puts into supplementing the magic makes the rest of us look like rank amateurs. We all hate her a little for it, but then she gives us stuff and the hate stops.

~*~

~~Rooftops~~

~~The fog rolled in from over the Border~~

~~An archipelago emerged from the turmoil~~

~~With seven-league boots I could be the explorer~~

~~Of each new tile-moss-thatch terra firma~~ ugh, whimsy does _not_ suit me.

~*~

Nutmeg’s one of those tall, skinny, grey-eyed World types who n00bs mistake for Trueblood all the time. She doesn’t exactly go out of her way to deny it, either, even if she does look a little guilty when I see her not correcting said n00bs. She showed up from the World with the remains of an inheritance, too many clothes, and a couple muttered lines about running from her problems and proceeded to get a job under Jay. She now divides her time between that and hanging at Rose Ashes on Fifth and Water Street with her buddies Mouse and Liz Tailor (tiny human linguistics student and Trueblood owner of one of those stores that sells repurposed Soho fashions to uptowners, respectively.) Like everyone else I’ve ever met here she’s a creative dilettante (writes some, acts some, knows contact juggling and devil sticks enough to get by) but aside from baking and reading she’s more ADD about her hobbies than almost anyone I’ve ever met. Still, she occupies the coveted position of Soho Resident Who Gets By Without Selling Out or Being in a Gang, so my respect is palpable, if grudging.

~*~

Apricot Strudel of Doom Recipe:

 

 ~~NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS~~. Thanks, Jay. Thanks a lot.

~*~

 ~~Yes, Dahut’s Breton, (by descent, anyway) yes, the coloring is all natural, and yes, she’ll show you her World birth certificate with “Dahut Marie Tanet” printed on it if you dare to accuse her of being a poseur. She hides the rest of her defensive insecurity behind an incredibly obvious façade of sophistry passed off as wisdom and snideness passed off as wit, most of which she unloads on the Wordhole and Rhymer free publications. She also waits tables uptown but since that would be yet another nail in the coffin of her _bohémienne_ mystique she tends to threaten bodily harm on people who bring it up. As well as anyone who calls her straight, exes, gang members who could crush her like a bug, better writers~~ Fuck it, introspection is depressing.

~*~

Border quotidiana is probably an entire literary genre in the World (and probably the Realm, too) by now, so here goes: Today at work I pulled $11.54, two Cadbury’s bars, a nice notebook with obviously homemade paper and about two days’ worth of food in Realm scrip in tips. Yesterday it was a box of Pekoe, five bucks and a greenish fake-gold ring with a real agate in it. Thursday I got no money but both my all of two tables wished me well in a vaguely authoritative manner and I was actually energetic enough to finish two columns and then hit the Ferret with Tudor Rose and Jaya afterward, so at least one of them must have really meant it.

~*~

There aren’t a ton of strip clubs in the Scandal District (sex is one of the few things elves are less weird about than humans) but Ginger, aka Euphrasie (I’ll allow you to guess which is the stage name) works at one. It’s right where Scandal starts to bleed into the Promenade, so you know it’s classy, but she does talk a lot about missing her old job. Apparently it existed in a basement across from Mrs. Wu’s and the tips were mostly shiny junk but she didn’t have to tailor her routines to be a resemblance of Soho instead of just pure, undiluted B-town anarchic youth culture centered around a pole. She still dances with bells braided into pink dreads and artfully ripped clothes but the clothes are sewn that way, not just repurposed from what she could fix with duct tape and pins. Someday someone’s going to scientifically prove the “live long enough to become the thing you hate” adage, and when they do Ginger and I agree we’ll be first in line as case studies.

~*~

The hill, the brugh, the tain

Silver that reflects—are they mounds, or mirrors?

It’s ultimately plain—

We watched we made them into us like Narcissus

And so we sought them out

Concave surface warping everyone into self-parody

Curves softening the shout:

“Don’t clap your hands if you believe in fairies.”

~*~

I found Jainie wandering around way too close to south Ho Street with a cat carrier full of small, grumpy tortoiseshell in one hand and an overnight bag stuffed with the kind of shit you think you'll need in B-town (silver jewelry, Rackham collection, recorder) in the other. Because I am a soft fucking touch and remembered being the idiot she was not so long ago, I took her home, gave her some ramen and a spot in my armchair, then turned her over the next morning to the nearest squat I could think of where they wouldn't rip her off or turn her cat into fur accessories. She now works across the street from me at Let Down Your Locks sweeping the floors and occasionally busking outside to supplement that and draw in customers. It seems to be keeping her in food and a new thread color every week and she'll always play my favorite Horn Dance songs if she knows I'm working so I'd call it a net win.

~*~

Why do I even try writing poetry? It never comes out right, but every time I pick up a pen I feel like lyrical abstraction is the only way I can _really_ express myself and I should try again. It's like the same basic, twee "I'm coming to Bordertown to be _myself_ and see the _magic_ of everything!" mentality that drew me here instead of somewhere with plumbing that occasionally works and where the laws of physics are consistent. Too special for regular backpacking, that's me. Maybe I should just try some Modernist-type stream-of-consciousness shit instead. A Romantic's knee-jerk hatred of any literary tradition that happened after the turn of the twentieth century couldn't hurt my chances, right?

~*~

Kiki was a casualty of Castle Pup who managed to bounce back after a while on the street and between hostels. Apparently her parents are second-gen Realm expats who have a place in Gryphon Park but since she would rather thoroughly masticate broken glass than go back there she's managed to put her talents for surviving to being a Nevernever scout/general procurer for Snappin' Wizard's and a couple other freelance mages. These days she spends most of her time out there with her little rat dog George Gordon who's trained like a truffle pig but for blood moss and fairy rings, living in a tent and trading whatever she finds for pounds on pounds of silver and freeze-dried coffee. Apparently she plans to reture to a little cottage just off the suburbs with that stuff someday but the way the Nevernever will chew you up and spit you out I wouldn't be surprised if she ended up retiring to the inside of a tree, Merlin-style, before that happens.

~*~

 ~~One two, one two, the sound of older den words spun newly oldly into the lines that bind us all of us here together like the web, the Net, the one that surrounds us all and keeps us kept and sleeping in this dream on a cold hillside or really quite sure it is love, lovingly laid down alongside lava-red mud and water and blood all~~ UGH. No more Modernism. Ever.


	2. Pages 12-36

I got lucky, but I also took the precautions. Fifty chocolate bars and twenty pounds of coffee, warm coat, towel, (because even when you’re staying planetside you should know where your towel is) a travel guide, toiletries and sleeping bag, and my passport plus birth certificate before I started packing all the fancy notebooks I’d been afraid to use or any poetry collections. It didn’t rain my first night, or even until I’d found my way to Under-the-Hill. Jay found me on Week Two after I’d exhausted all the other rental options that weren’t an arm and a leg and referenced me. So now I make rent and get my ramen and community garden vegetables from the co-op two blocks over, though both much more regularly since I started working at Goblin Fruit. Nider might be ex-Pack scum who makes people pay rent on glorified squats but he’ll fix stuff if it breaks (and Kore doesn’t get to it first) and he lets Andy rent—even lets her pay less for that shitty attic—so I don’t hold it against him too much. It’s not a glamorous life, but I never expected it would be (she told herself in almost-convincing black and white) and at this point I think that consistent utilities and transportation more reliable than Bike With Attached Wagon would just spoil me.

                                                                 ~*~                                                               

Turns out Andy’s S.O.’s name is Nix and they go by “they.” They were one of those types whose neighborhood was sort of osmosed into B-town post-2012, which was more of a relief for them than anything else since it allowed them to stop wearing makeup to work and pretending to be some complete stranger named Leona. They also lucked out enough to land right in the lap of Her Highness Damiana, Queen of Soho LGBT Affairs, who set them up with a place to live and a job as a bike messenger. This is what I learned last night along with the fact that they make a mean Spanish omelet, they keep weird hours that barely coincide with Andy’s sometimes, and when they get drunk they sing a lot and usually end up dumping their entire life story on you (according to them.) I’ve got to start hanging out downstairs more often.

~*~

I tried to go home my first month before I realized I could cross the river without dropping dead. I caught a bus to the edge of town before it promptly broke down and I walked about a mile into the Nevernever before no fairy-tale cottage complete with wise old crone appeared to either turn me into something unwholesome or tell me the way back to Waukesha. I got back to town before dark, blew the last of my cash getting drunk at the Ferret, and forgot the whole thing. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

~*~

Jaya occupies the title of the Nice Cook at Goblin Fruit, as opposed to Metz, Wentworth and Susito who believe in treating the waitstaff like the gluttonous, lazy, entitled little bitches that most of us are. She apparently got her start trying to hitchhike to Mumbai from the crappy little tourist town she grew up in and ended up in B-town instead. Fortunately she’d done a lot of cooking in her uncle’s restaurant/hotel growing up and knew enough English to get by so Wentworth and Manager Alex gave her a job right away. She’s put a lot of the northern Indian food she grew up making onto the menu (heavily seasoned with weird Realm fusion ingredients) and will usually sneak bread or grilled vegetables to any servers who are hungry so just about everyone likes her a lot. The one exception these days seems to be Server Alex who still blames her for getting him caught going down on her in the walk-in fridge that one time, though he doesn’t seem to have been angry enough about it to have actually stopped doing it.

~*~

Shortcut to G/E’s House:

  * Take GP Bridge to Iridia St.
  * Double back one block, take a left (be sure to turn fully widdershins first)
  * Take path w/ trees, not paved path (goes to Tintown, hooray)
  * When road reappears, turn right at green brick wall. House is a two-story World brownstone with a rosebush eating most of the front planter box



~*~

As if you couldn’t guess by the name, Mustardseed is a Shakespeare enthusiast and then some. She is, in fact, the head of the Rude Mechanicals, the only (as far as I know) all-Trueblood guerilla Shakespeare troupe in B-town or to either side of it. I’ve only seen them perform officially once ( _Antony and Cleopatra_ , Act IV Scene XV in the little plaza near where I eat lunch sometimes) but one guy in the troupe, Tarry, lives next door to home so I’ve seen them practicing there a bunch. Mustard usually seems to enjoy the comedic roles (I remember her really rocking Feste one time, and her ‘Hey Ho, the Wind and Rain’ legit gave me goosebumps) and her weird TB interpretation of Shakespeare with the emoting all switched around is good enough I bet they could really succeed if more people knew about them. Hardly anyone does, though, and I suspect that’s the point.

~*~

Bad Date Ideas:

  * Mad River swimming
  * Hike in the Nevernever
  * Tour of scenic ~~Riverside~~ Tintown
  * Elf-tipping
  * Anything involving Wolfboy



Good Date Ideas:

  * ???



~*~

Andy managed to start a fire in the shed last week. No one got hurt and it didn’t spread but a bunch of her materials were ruined and she’s had to move half of the rest inside and the other half to a studio space in Riverside that yours truly scored her from a Rhymer-based acquaintance who’s moving back to the World. Kore’s claiming she’ll build a new one out of an old storage pod a friend of her has but I’ll believe that when I hear Nider say it won’t drive down his property values. Obviously Andy’s pretty down, so all of us (except Jay, who was on a deadline for Café Cubana) took her out to dinner at OMGWTFBBQ last night and that seemed to help, at least for the nonce.

~*~

  * Eggs (try Jason/Johanna’s if co-op is out)
  * Milk
  * Bleach
  * Batteries
  * New hairbrush
  * Bundle of reeds with which to beat hairbrush-breaker
  * Chapstick
  * A/C charm (not Snappin’ Wizard’s this time, Kore says the last one melted a window)
  * Cat food



~*~

Izelle claims to have come to the Border because urban exploration in the rest of the world was getting too boring. I think that secretly she just wants to find a way into the Realm, just like everyone else and their dog who comes here from the World, just through some abandoned patch of Dogtown rather than being scooped up onto the Fairy Queene's horse and carried off like the rest of us unimaginative assholes. So I'm not casting stones—it seems like she has a better chance her way, frankly. My single foray into urban exploration with her ended with me nearly getting tetanus from some abandoned Wharf Rat shelter under a bridge after I didn't look where I was jumping and landed in a pile of scrap metal so rusted it was more like scrap filigree. That (plus the fact that she wasn't interested anyway—I'm a sucker for South African accents, okay?) was enough to keep me from going with her anymore. However, we shop at most of the same places so I usually end up pumping her for stories in the check-out line at the co-op and she doesn't seem to mind at all. (Last week: hiding from Bloods in that old Ferris wheel in Riverside. This week: finding some weird little mushroom-headed creature in an old grocery store in the suburbs. Next week: god only knows, just keep talking, please.)

~*~

The view from my room is probably the nicest in the house. Andy's is the highest up, obviously, but her only window faces south so she's mostly just got a few houses before the wall and then Tintown stretching on from there like the world's most depressing lumpy brown mattress. Mine faces west, which can be annoying in the evening when the sun shines right into my eyes across the desk I'm still too lazy to move (thank god for the pretty, very thick Realm brocade curtains I just scored at Trader's Heaven.) Still, there's a very nice view of post-Cleanup Fare-You-Well Park just past the blue Painted Lady house next door where the Rude Mechanicals hang out. It also looks over our own backyard which is a little less prepossessing now that the Art Shed is now a slightly charred concrete foundation but still actually has grass and a few very stubborn wildflowers Kora planted near the fence which is more than most people on our street can say. I was a little disappointed when I moved in that it didn't face the Border, but the constant wavering would probably make me motion sick anyway. Besides, I can see it if I'm sitting at the left corner of my desk and crane my neck a little, which is always good for that bump of combined longing, sadness, and HOLY SHIT I LIVE IN BORDERTOWN that's probably the closest thing I have to an anti-drug.


	3. Pages 37-50

I've been feeling bad about my character sketches here being readable as "all chicks, plus Nix who might as well be a chick" so in the interest of respecting Nix's gender identity, here goes: Susito was closer to ten than twenty when Metz hired him straight out of Ciudad de Mexico whence he'd come following some girl he had a crush on but who only had eyes for B-town (and, apparently, werewolves.) Fortunately, city boy that he is he adjusted pretty fast and is now the best saute cook we have. At least I am assured so by Jaya who can never get the gas range to work right and by Wentworth who objects to doing anything but baking and butchery generally. He started out as Jesús but then we hired a Guatemalan waiter half his size whose name was also Jesús and it stuck, as did everyone's tendency to treat him like the dorky but surprisingly competent little brother that most of us either never had or left behind in the World/the Realm. (I may or may not have tried to indirectly set him up with Jainie on one occasion but I don't think it came to anything, thank god.)

~*~

I still kind of miss my Civic, but it's in a better place now. Plus walking/riding Bike With Attached Wagon/trudging hopefully from bus stop to bus stop hoping a bus might actually come means my legs have never looked better, and there's always the chance that I'll take a wrong turn and end up in the Realm by accident which I don't think you could swing with a car. Probably not, but hope springs eternal for us dorks who came here hoping to trip our way into that shit.

~*~

My next-door neighbors who aren’t Tarry and them are Sallie (short for Long Tall Sallie, two things she definitely is) and her merry band of food nerds. I think the lease actually belongs to her roommate Matt River, owner of the Great Balls of Fire food truck (best description I can think of is “frat boy dare food”—it’s not badly executed, but don’t try the hotwings if you enjoy having taste buds that aren't cauterized out of existence) but I mostly know Sallie. Specifically from when the proto-Wordhole staff used to meet up at Volga’s Pretty Little Hut where she’s a waitress and always used to give us free refills on chai and their really awesome black rye bread. She moonlights as their prep cook, can make a mean batch of almond shortbreads, and has a set of dreads longer than I am which I’m pretty sure are magicked bone-white. Either that or she’s secretly Storm from X-Men but her lack of weather control powers (as far as I know) seem to suggest otherwise.

~*~

A lonely girl who had no seven wounds

Sat in a tower, looking, touching naught.

She found a job, some friends, some local types

Who wowed her—but when push came down to shove

She was too scared to let them in at all

To end the poem with an upbeat turn

Instead of forcing it to trail on

In pseudo-Coleridegian rambling.

If Fairyland’s beyond our mortal reach

Should we stop writing poems about it? Why?

(to be finished when I’ve thought it out a little more.)

~*~

Yvan Czarovich, aka Vadin Opitz, is the only male dancer at Ginger’s club (Scandal On The Promenade—got to hand it for them for that name.) As such he mostly desists for dual (duet? pas de deux?) numbers with the rest of the girls but which leave even my Kinsey 5 ass wondering why the bullshit World norms they still cling happily onto uptown prevent such a perfect specimen from getting naked on a regular basis. His English isn’t amazing and he has yet to find a translation spell that carries any kind of idiomatic nuance and/or doesn’t make him sound like he’s using an electrolarynx, but the twenty World bucks I tipped him and Ginger last week for their Death and the Maiden-inspired routine seems to have brought us together faster than any amount of awkward stage-door small talk ever could.

~*~

I wasn’t quite honest with the story about going home. I’d gotten to the part of the Nevernever I mentioned, but just as I was about to turn around I saw a light off in the distance. I stared at it for a minute, then freaked out and started walking very fast back toward town but not before my brain convinced me I’d actually seen a little fairytale cottage with firelight in the windows. I almost turned back around a couple times, but with every step I kept telling myself that it was probably just a late bus or a will-o’-the-wisp or some kind of horrible land anglerfish that would eat me if I got too close. So I threw myself back at the weirdness I at least knew, and here I am still. I am the worst at fairytales.

~*~

The health inspector’s been coming around Soho (I know, right?) so Jay’s finally had to sink all her savings into the actual pro kitchen space on Fifth and Carmine she’d been planning to move the biz into in another year. Her underlings, Paco and Nutmeg, seem to have taken to the place well and their output doesn’t seem to have suffered even through the move judging by the platters of Apricot Strudel of Doom and Black Forest cookies I kept seeing in the usual places even while they were packing up and moving shop. Okay, the Black Forest cookies were only once and I still have no idea how they had that much chocolate to blow on one batch of cookies for Rose Ashes but I would sell my own mother for half of one more.

~*~

Thoughtful Gift Ideas:

  * Les Mis something (maybe Song Factory has the libretto?)
  * Makeup (what?)
  * Snake for act
  * Puppy
  * Chocolate
  * Mace (chemical or blunt object—could source from Andy?)
  * One of those LED-looking Realm rings/necklaces all the tourists are wearing
  * New ribbons



~*~

Vicia is _the_ hottest new solo thing on the Soho club circuit and if she hasn’t been approached by five separate World talent scouts and potential Realm patrons as of when I saw her at the Wheat Sheaf last week I will eat this gross, stale scone that’s currently gathering dust on my windowsill. She’s really petite for a Trueblood and has those really beautifully delicate features that make her look like an old cameo brooch figure rather than some kind of rodent/mustelid like so many TBs. None of her songs were anything I’d heard before (it was a weird kind of operatic sound I've never heard from Realm music before) and they were all in whatever language she speaks so for all I know the lyrics could have been the Realm equivalent of Lady Gaga at her most insipid but it sounded so beautiful I didn’t care. Judging by the way most of the floor was staring with their tongues hanging out I’m certainly not alone in this, but if she notices me now I’m totally calling dibs. (Ginger, if I’ve totally misjudged you and you’re reading this, firstly don’t read my private shit and secondly I’m kidding.)

~*~

The Mad River: 1 part Jaeger, 1 part Dogtown Apple Wine, (made with apples… well, mostly apples) 1 dash fish sauce. Garnish with chopped cocktail onions and pickles to evoke river debris.

Sunset Over Soho: 1 part Cointreau, 1 part mead, 1 dash bitters, top with Bacardi and light.

Tintown Blues: 1 part ~~Laphroiag~~ Laphroaig, 1 part Maker’s Mark, 1 part whatever that godawful potato vodka I had at Kore’s party was.

~*~

It continues to confuse me how Kore can spend all day doing contractor shit and still look no more disheveled than she does after a night of clubbing at the end, but I guess B-town brings out the magic in us all. (Seriously, her Sandman Death-inspired makeup is never a single flake out of place. I'm starting to wonder if she isn't Death herself just going through a slightly less monochromatic phase.) My point is she got the promised storage pod and has been carving another art space out of it all week in her spare time because apparently she owes Andy some kind of huge favor from back in the day. I would have thought that talking Nider into letting Andy rent one of his precious rooms in this weird part of Soho where people actually own property would have covered that and then some, but she doesn't seem to think so and it's making Andy (and by extension the rest of the house) happy enough that I'm not about to contradict her.

~*~

When the King returned from Avalon, the sky and sea blazed behind her until the horizon was consumed by light and there was nothing left to divide the heavens from the earth. After undoing God’s work, she undid man’s, tearing down maps and governments in equal measure to unite the world in her own image. The Golden Age stretched to the stars, the premillenial dispensationalists waited for the Rapture and the Beltane fires blazed from hilltop to planetside. She saw her work and retreated into herself, anticipating its fall but unwilling to wait for it this time. (I don't know what any of this means; I just banged it out while I was still half asleep this morning. It wasn't even a dream or anything. I just thought it sounded cool.)


	4. Pages 51-110

Waffles, aka Pirate Pete, aka That Fucking Cat is a one-eyed brown tabby who has decided that the back door/Dumpster area of Goblin Fruit is his private food source and god help any other cats or even humans who try to use it for anything else. This is mostly thanks to waiters Ling and Tudor Rose who gifted him the name Waffles and keep feeding him despite Wentworth and Manager Alex's best efforts. I keep trying to convince someone to take him home with them so I'm not constantly being begged for bread and chicken scraps whenever I go out to smoke, but so far no one's stepped up.

~*~

Today's tip haul: 10 Euros, 500 yen, $21.85 local, a small container of blood moss ointment, two World lipsticks (Sunny Bronze and Queen of the Amazons—I don't usually wear lipstick, so I might sell 'em) and two Cadbury Milk bars. Yesterday: $10.21 local, a couple shiny rocks that turned out to be tiger's eye, half a pack of Camels (THANK YOU JESUS) and a cool feather which may or may not have been part of the actual tip but which I took home anyway and stuck in the tiny vase Kore gave me for my birthday. It's sort of iridescent teal with a few little white flecks and could be from anything from a male mallard to some Realm bird that speaks in riddles and grants wishes. Maybe I'll try burning it or calling on the bird or something to find out.

~*~

La Senda, aka Ami, aka Edgar, is sort of like a Hispano-Elvish Lady Gaga if Lady Gaga were an extremely unassuming Spanish guy about half the time. Her attempts to out-weird everyone in this city of excessively weird people include gowns that wouldn't be out of place in the court of Louis XIV, heels tall enough to make Screaming Lord Neville think twice, (the two are exes, rivals, or both depending on who you believe) and some sort of source for living cats and foxes trained to act as accessories. It's not a bad attempt, and her shows at Danceland where she's finally getting top billing are always well-attended. The weirdest part for me is the other half of the time when you see him sitting out front of Cafe Cubana looking like some mild-mannered halfie guy from UCLA or something, right down to the giant black glasses which seem to be popular in the World right now (god knows why) and the flannel shirts. S/he's so comfortable in either persona that I'm honestly a little jealous. It must be nice to have two completely different people you can switch between being at will instead of just trying to cram the five billion things that any given person is into one existence like the rest of us.

~*~

If I could write lyrics worth a damn I would write a song for you so that you could dance the parts of you that I see for everyone. Actually even if my lyrics sucked your routine would probably be so good that the audience would fall as in love with you as I am and that seems like it would cause problems, so never mind.

~*~

Beldame is one of those Francesca Lia Block-reading, Hot Topic-shopping, fairy-wing-wearing types who embraces the shit she gets for wholeheartedly adhering to the stereotype. Apparently she got her name when she tried to bleach her hair True Silver, (Miss Mithril's, Snappin' Wizard's discount bin, or any number of shady Trader's Heaven stalls) it turned old-person grey, and her Taco Hell coworkers started calling her "Beldame Sans Merci." Much like Piggy from Lord of the Flies she realized it was about the best she was going to get nickname-wise—even had some Keats in there—and she embraced that, too. That fact, plus the fact that she's survived B-town in all its grungy, surprisingly prosaic glory for three years, is enough to make me respect her a lot more than I do a lot of my own ilk who are too cool for fairy wings.

~*~

She wore her insecurities less on her sleeve than in place of sleeves, sheer enough to show off the burns and stretch marks but tight and garish-colored enough that her ironic fashion awareness couldn't be called into question.

~*~

Kit apparently just made the cutoff for some sort of brief World resurgence in 2006 of all years and she's subsequently been fossilized here like the world's skinniest, whitest dragonfly in amber. In my first week here I managed to trade two Rammstein CDs someone had left in my room at Under-the-Hill to her for roughly half the contents of the counter of Schwarzwald Cafe and we've been vaguely-defined friends ever since Her other interests (slam poetry, motorcycles, some French guy she left behind in the World) are pretty par for the course, but I mostly just find myself wondering how the fuck someone who still knows and cares what homestarrunner.com and the O RLY owl are managed to get here. It's possible, considering her extremely static appearance and the fact that I never see her outside Schwarzwald, that she's a ghost who actually made it over through the Other Side instead, but then again it seems equally possible that she only owns one shirt.

~*~

The dimmed day

has left me standing

along in rustling, restless rain

collecting in niches and corners

of my face like brineless sweat.

To gaze through the miasma

is to look through a scrim

a screen, a gossamer ball of movement

weighting down leaves

sorrows

fears

~*~

I really thought it would be some Trueblood ice queen who wouldn't give me the time of day and I could pine after picturesquely without any danger of my feelings being reciprocated. Not a 100% human burlesque dancer with bells in her braids and a genuine affection for the people she dances for. Especially not one who, against all odds, seems to like me as much as I like her.

(Ginger's the real name, by the way. Euphrasie is apparently the real name of Cosette from _Les Miserables_ of which she is the biggest fan I've ever met. Book and musical, even. She tried getting me to read the former but I started flagging around the first complete character switch and never really picked it back up. Apparently she doesn't hold it against me.)

~*~

Two separate creative snippets I haven't felt the need to apologize for or justify? What's the world coming to? Considering I'm almost out of room in this journal it seems pretty appropriate, really. After being disabused of my initial starry-eyed delusions of how it would be to live in B-town, I've powered through my disillusionment and come out the other side back into doing stuff I enjoy without second-guessing myself or feeling the need to be Practical and Realistic and all of those other things you need to actually survive around here. However, considering I'm about to go out to dinner at my favorite restaurant with the girl I'm more madly in love with than I've been with anyone in years, I can't even bring myself to write any snippy little marginalia about how this won't last and I'll be back to hating my job and my creative output and myself by tomorrow morning. I'm going to keep powering through and filling up journals and growing and changing as a person and being in love with Ginger and the part of my brain that says I shouldn't can get fucked along with the abovementioned apologies for expressing myself.

Who knows, maybe I'll even go back and look for that cottage in the Nevernever. I've got a wish, a vague location, and a mystery feather, and if those things don't make narrative causality kick in I'll just write my own, better ending.


End file.
